Billy Shaw lives in Potterís Pleasure Palace: the best entertainment venue in 1930s Yorkshire. Jasper Harper lives in the big house above the valley with his eccentric mother Edie and Uncle Charles, authors who have fled London for the seclusion of the moors. Billy is sent to become Jasperís companion, and befriends the wild, peculiar boy Ė but the air in the Harper household is thick with secrets. When Charles and Edie are found dead, it is ruled a double suicide, but fictions have become tangled up in facts and itís left to Anna Sallis, almost a century later, to piece together the truth ...